Gentrification is originally an issue of class, but while it used to be a matter of changes happening to neighborhoods house by house, brought on by middle-class urban dwellers, in its current iteration, as described in Leslie Kern’s “Gentrification is inevitable and other lies” (2022, Verso books) the process is a different beast altogether:
“Gentrification is being facilitated by forces much more powerful than your average middle-class homeowner: city governments, developers, investors, speculators, and distant digital platforms that create new ways to profit from urban space.”(1)
And then there’s also a more recent expansion of the above working definitions - political and aesthetic - through the angle taken by Sarah Schulman in her book "The Gentrification of the Mind Witness to a Lost Imagination” (2012, University of California Press), to add further depth to the issue. Schulman asked herself:
“What is this process? What is this thing that homogenizes complexity, difference, and dynamic dialogic action for change and replaces it with sameness? With a kind of institutionalization of culture? With a lack of demand on the powers that be? With containment? My answer to that question always came back to the same concept: gentrification.” and proceeded to define this as "while literal gentrification was very important to what I was observing, there was also a spiritual gentrification that was affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their own condition. There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.”
Gentrification, as defined above, ends up being an invisible process. One which only punctures to the surface once it’s complete, once the displacement has been operated. It’s also a stiffness, a lack of action, it’s a lack. It creeps and crawls and removes through mechanisms that can feel like they’re silent unless you’re the target.
I’ve done an action and reflected in real-time on a situation that contains the parameters of gentrification as privatization and inaccessibility of public space, a sort of “pay-to-play” way of looking at the city.
It all started on the 10th of February, 2023. Although it was a decision taken beforehand. But it’s on that date that the benches were removed from the non-paying section of the Rotterdam Central station. Anyone familiar with the structure of Dutch train stations knows that there is a check-in / check-out system available to travelers, and in bigger stations, there are gates that one needs to go through. In the case of Rotterdam Central, there were benches available for travelers to rest on both before the check-in gates and after them. Due to the perceived nuisance in the station, there was a decision taken in concert by the Municipality of Rotterdam and the NS (railway company) to remove the benches from the non-paying part of the station.
The debate about this was documented in the news as well as on social media.
This would be a decision that would highlight who has access to non-paying facilities in the station, an exclusionary decision with a wide-ranging impact considering the around 170.000 passengers transiting Rotterdam Central daily.
The news reached me via social media, on February 12, as a Story, through the Instagram page of Cultural Workers Unite. Since I happened to be in Rotterdam at the time I decided to document the absence of the benches and amplify the post of CWU. To my surprise, the post had a lot of traction and soon enough, suggestions as to what could be done trickled in, with an emphasis put on doing a “sit-in” at the station as a form of protest. The means was framed as an anti-homelessness move and there was a lot of solidarity with addressing homelessness rather than removing public furniture to tackle a symptom of a larger city problem.
From proposal to action, there’s usually a small step. So I decided, given the growing number of people that liked the post (by now settled at 857) to initiate a sit-in on February 13th, a Monday. I borrowed a stool from the KABK and announced I will be sitting in the station, where the benches were located, a day after I posted the notice of the removal of the benches. My curiosity was whether the people suggesting the sit-in would show up. And what the threshold is between a public complaint and public action. One emphasis when it comes to the angle of “gentrification of the mind” is not just on a lack of complaint, but also on a lack of action when it comes to issues of public concern.
To my surprise we were around 10 people, with various types of chairs, showing up on the occasion of the first sit-in. The cozy crowd was not particularly made up of the people that suggested the sit-in, but there were people with various local networks, among which I counted: two local artists, a squatter, an architect, a journalist, and a political party member from a leftist party. By any stretch of the imagination, this first sit-in was a success. Since it happened to begin with. But if the goal was to bring the benches back, 10 people would not particularly “make spring”. But the small shy protest had a follow-up.
Later in the week, I was approached by one of the Rotterdam artists who was present at the first sit-in, then by a student from the black feminist student association Erasmus School of Colour. They both individually decided to make further actions - to serve soup and do a reading session. I put them in contact with one another and agreed to their suggestion of Friday the 17th for a new sit-in. A permit was asked for. The media was somehow notified (Open Rotterdam, Rijnmond, PZC). I joined them and amplified the new action further and this time around we ended up with a more substantial turn-out, including political reps from BIj1, Groen Links, SP, and reps from Cultural Workers Unite, Doorbraak.eu, ESOC, with support from Roodkapje, a community center close to Rotterdam Central, and most likely the most impressive participant - a representative from the NS that sat down on one of the chairs during the gathering.
The extended coverage of the action could later on be found online.
It’s worth noting that the mayor of Rotterdam had reacted to the protest and also made discriminatory remarks in his reaction, remarks of which I only ended up being aware of after the protest.
In short:
"Furthermore, Aboutaleb explained his decision to remove the benches in the hall of Rotterdam Central. “That's because those benches had become the living environment of people from, for example, Romania. We have created that climate ourselves in the European Parliament by making it possible for us to be seconded there and them here. But it is only beneficial for us to be posted in Romania. It is not favorable for the Romanians to be posted here. I think the minimum wage there is 800 euros and here it is 1900 euros, but that man comes to work here for 800 euros. It is therefore not surprising that the man sleeps and lives in his car or at the station. People do their business there, sleep there. This creates feelings of insecurity for travelers. That's not what the station is for. We are now having a political debate about this."”
On the grand scale of things, it does seem like poetic justice, as a Romanian citizen, to initiate serendipitously initiate such a protest as a reaction to a discriminatory decision taken against Romanian nationals. The issue, though reaches beyond this. The issue is about accessibility to city facilities and who the city is available for, as well as the impact public action, in this case, artist-driven, but not exclusively, can have on discriminatory political decisions.
The benches are, after all, a symptom of an uncaring city, a city that excludes based on income, which shuts out the precarious. The article from de Havenloods goes on to explain that the homeless shelter available in the area had its facilities reduced:
"Siavash Montazeri, who organizes the winter shelter on behalf of the NAS, also asked the mayor about the winter shelter and why it cannot remain open permanently, because it is very unclear and organizationally difficult for people to keep opening and closing. “There is a political conversation going on,” the mayor responded. “It is a political choice. I was amazed that we were able to keep everyone indoors during corona time. Why can't that be forever?"
The benches are still in storage at the moment. This small action has proven the drive to activate social action propelled by artists and the need for this to form social cohesion around an urgent anti-gentrification topic.